Do you want unlimited Metro rides at the University of Maryland, or not? It doesn’t matter, because college is a “socialistic society,” so you’ll pay either way.

That’s the curious rationalization for a $130 per-semester fee that the university’s Residence Hall Association wants to impose on all on-campus residents.

The Diamondback reports the RHA approved the “Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority anytime ridership resolution” Tuesday night, but according to Transportation Advisory Committee Chairman Matt O’Brien, the resolution is basically a formality:

“The Department of Transportation Services is ready to implement it as soon as possible,” the freshman economics major said. “RHA has already approved the budgets, but the budgets haven’t been moved to the Board of Regents yet, so there’s some time.”

Campus leaders have been pressuring the school since October, when the RHA passed its first resolution, to subsidize Metro fares.

“When you come to college, you pay into a socialistic society,” O’Brien said. “… If you stay in a similar place as someone else and you use 10 times as much water as that person, you don’t pay more money, [and] people aren’t upset about that. You are helping someone else ride the Metro and it’s not like you’re not getting anything out of it.”

Nothing wrong with that logic!

As noted by a fellow senator, the university recently raised the cost of a parking permit by 10.3 percent, and RHA had no problem with that. (And as noted by this author, the university is served exclusively by WMATA’s Red Line, the most overcrowded and sluggish line in the crime-riddledsystem, so the “unlimited” rides might be a raw deal.)

Greg spent several years as a technology policy reporter and editor for Warren Communications News in Washington, D.C., and guest host on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators.” He co-founded the alternative newspaper PUNCH and served as a reporter, editor and columnist for The Falcon at Seattle Pacific University.